TWOFOLD
Kari Achatz & Dominique Mediak-PirigyiJul 18 6:00pm — Aug 30, 2025 5:00pm
TwoFold
On view at Hunt Art Gallery, downtown Buffalo, through August 30.
In TwoFold, artists Kari Achatz and Dominique Mediak-Pirigyi present a body of new works that explore process, play, and working in pairs. Both Buffalo-based art teachers, they discovered in preparing for this show they each had been working in twos without realizing it, making paired pieces, circling back to ideas, and pushing techniques further. What began as a way of playing with form turned into a shared approach of experimenting, realizing an idea was not finished, and making another. With each piece created with a companion in mind, these works are meant to be seen together, to speak to one another, and to invite you into that quiet conversation. Sometimes they reflect, sometimes they contrast, but always they are connected.
Kari Achatz
Achatz’s work has long revolved around the act of cutting, her X-acto knife becoming a paintbrush, developing its own cutting language. In earlier works she cut into the backs of photographs, and in this new series she turns to Tyvek, a durable construction material resistant to light, water, and smooth to the blade.“Each cut I make informs the next…an intuitive, unplanned process…a combination of man and nature,” she explained at the artist talk, this past Saturday. As brain, hand and wrist sync together, “I can probably do it with eyes closed,” she continued.
In Echoes in Violet, a 44 x 12-inch hanging scroll, tiny scales and acorn-like cuts cascade down the surface. With one sweep of her hand, she showed the audience how the flaps bend and shift with light, fragile in appearance yet remarkably strong, material as metaphor. On another wall, Second Nature Amethyst and Second Nature Azure flank the sage-green depths of the larger Silent Reverberations. Their cut forms ripple and spiral like water droplets across a mirrored forest lake, or sunlight shifting through foliage, as the black surface layers open to reveal carefully chosen colored and cut paper beneath. Presented in double layered glass, shadows cast to the wall and move with the viewer. Elsewhere, pairs such as What the Day Remembers & What the Night Remembers, and Veiled Visions & Tethered Thoughts, layer white Tyvek over painted and batiked papers, spaced apart from their supports allowing shadow to play within the frames themselves. This exhibition reveals Achatz’s expanding vocabulary of biomorphic shapes and new preoccupation with circular forms. Her cutting language is invites viewers to pause, look closer, and reconsider how light, material, and perspective shape meaning.
The conceptual roots of Achatz’s work reach back to a moment at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, a school trip where she brought her students. Imagining a young oracle inhaling vapors, transmitting visions to an intermediary who would then determine what to disclose to the public. That question of mediation, what is revealed and what is withheld, carries through her use of positive and negative space. Shifting with movement and shadow, each step to the left or right, each dip or rise, provides a different impression, insight, or narrative to carry with you.
I’m interested in the in-between spaces where memory meets perception, where something hidden might come into view. The process of cutting, layering, and revealing is my way of exploring that space, of asking what happens when two parts of something are placed side by side. As you move through the work, I hope you’ll notice not just the pieces themselves, but the relationships between them. The tension, the harmony, the pause between one thought and the next. In this body of work, I hope you find space to see something familiar in a new way, or something entirely unexpected waiting to be noticed. — Kari Achatz
Dominique Mediak-Pirigyi
Mediak-Pirigyi’s ceramics practice, by the name Linwood Modern, begins with vintage slipcast molds, assembling their simplistic shapes to create teapots, ewers, and bowls that she pours, alters, and reimagines. “I like to ask, what happens if you flip something inside out?” she says. After casting, she cuts and rearranges pieces, sometimes letting them sit for months before finishing, nothing is wasted.
She applies a water-etching process to some of her vessels, as seen in Fern Cornet Pair, where she paints the surface, covers it with Tyvek or cut paper, and then washes away layers to reveal colorful, raised patterns and images. The beveled light blue and green ferns around the rim of the cornucopia-inspired vase complement the flowers arranged to cascade horizontally and bountifully from its mouth, creating a harmonious interplay between surface and form. In Shadow Play, a pair of ewers, the designs are directly inspired from the cast shadows of her studio work light, the exaggerated handles sweeping in opposite directions while flowing simultaneously. A series of origami-inspired bowls carry impressions of eucalyptus stems and natural forms, folded together with function and ornament.
Mediak-Pirigyi’s works, mostly functional at heart, play with expectation, familiar objects turned unconventional through rearrangement. The pair of Inside Out vessels in Pale Green and Carmine, challenge our perception of a vase. Once whole forms, multiple vessels were cut in half and reassembled in threes, their hallow sides turned outward to reveal slender cylindrical glass tubes. What was once contained now unfolds, encouraging a fresh understanding of use and form. In every piece, she balances craft with curiosity, showing how small acts of play can transform the familiar into something altogether new.
Ceramic art often begs the question, is it functional or sculptural? The pieces I made for this exhibit attempt to push the boundaries of how we use ceramic objects by altering and combining more familiar forms, sometimes giving options in how the pieces may interact with one another. I envision these pieces becoming a foundation for whimsical centerpieces laden with botanical elements. — Dominique Mediak-Pirigyi
Together in TwoFold, Achatz and Mediak-Pirigyi celebrate the power of process and repetition, showing how works can converse with each other, evolve through experimentation, surprise, and challenge perceptions and expectations.
For inquiries, contact alexandria.ciel@huntartgallery.com.
TwoFold
On view at Hunt Art Gallery, downtown Buffalo, through August 30.
In TwoFold, artists Kari Achatz and Dominique Mediak-Pirigyi present a body of new works that explore process, play, and working in pairs. Both Buffalo-based art teachers, they discovered in preparing for this show they each had been working in twos without realizing it, making paired pieces, circling back to ideas, and pushing techniques further. What began as a way of playing with form turned into a shared approach of experimenting, realizing an idea was not finished, and making another. With each piece created with a companion in mind, these works are meant to be seen together, to speak to one another, and to invite you into that quiet conversation. Sometimes they reflect, sometimes they contrast, but always they are connected.
Kari Achatz
Achatz’s work has long revolved around the act of cutting, her X-acto knife becoming a paintbrush, developing its own cutting language. In earlier works she cut into the backs of photographs, and in this new series she turns to Tyvek, a durable construction material resistant to light, water, and smooth to the blade.“Each cut I make informs the next…an intuitive, unplanned process…a combination of man and nature,” she explained at the artist talk, this past Saturday. As brain, hand and wrist sync together, “I can probably do it with eyes closed,” she continued.
In Echoes in Violet, a 44 x 12-inch hanging scroll, tiny scales and acorn-like cuts cascade down the surface. With one sweep of her hand, she showed the audience how the flaps bend and shift with light, fragile in appearance yet remarkably strong, material as metaphor. On another wall, Second Nature Amethyst and Second Nature Azure flank the sage-green depths of the larger Silent Reverberations. Their cut forms ripple and spiral like water droplets across a mirrored forest lake, or sunlight shifting through foliage, as the black surface layers open to reveal carefully chosen colored and cut paper beneath. Presented in double layered glass, shadows cast to the wall and move with the viewer. Elsewhere, pairs such as What the Day Remembers & What the Night Remembers, and Veiled Visions & Tethered Thoughts, layer white Tyvek over painted and batiked papers, spaced apart from their supports allowing shadow to play within the frames themselves. This exhibition reveals Achatz’s expanding vocabulary of biomorphic shapes and new preoccupation with circular forms. Her cutting language is invites viewers to pause, look closer, and reconsider how light, material, and perspective shape meaning.
The conceptual roots of Achatz’s work reach back to a moment at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, a school trip where she brought her students. Imagining a young oracle inhaling vapors, transmitting visions to an intermediary who would then determine what to disclose to the public. That question of mediation, what is revealed and what is withheld, carries through her use of positive and negative space. Shifting with movement and shadow, each step to the left or right, each dip or rise, provides a different impression, insight, or narrative to carry with you.
I’m interested in the in-between spaces where memory meets perception, where something hidden might come into view. The process of cutting, layering, and revealing is my way of exploring that space, of asking what happens when two parts of something are placed side by side. As you move through the work, I hope you’ll notice not just the pieces themselves, but the relationships between them. The tension, the harmony, the pause between one thought and the next. In this body of work, I hope you find space to see something familiar in a new way, or something entirely unexpected waiting to be noticed. — Kari Achatz
Dominique Mediak-Pirigyi
Mediak-Pirigyi’s ceramics practice, by the name Linwood Modern, begins with vintage slipcast molds, assembling their simplistic shapes to create teapots, ewers, and bowls that she pours, alters, and reimagines. “I like to ask, what happens if you flip something inside out?” she says. After casting, she cuts and rearranges pieces, sometimes letting them sit for months before finishing, nothing is wasted.
She applies a water-etching process to some of her vessels, as seen in Fern Cornet Pair, where she paints the surface, covers it with Tyvek or cut paper, and then washes away layers to reveal colorful, raised patterns and images. The beveled light blue and green ferns around the rim of the cornucopia-inspired vase complement the flowers arranged to cascade horizontally and bountifully from its mouth, creating a harmonious interplay between surface and form. In Shadow Play, a pair of ewers, the designs are directly inspired from the cast shadows of her studio work light, the exaggerated handles sweeping in opposite directions while flowing simultaneously. A series of origami-inspired bowls carry impressions of eucalyptus stems and natural forms, folded together with function and ornament.
Mediak-Pirigyi’s works, mostly functional at heart, play with expectation, familiar objects turned unconventional through rearrangement. The pair of Inside Out vessels in Pale Green and Carmine, challenge our perception of a vase. Once whole forms, multiple vessels were cut in half and reassembled in threes, their hallow sides turned outward to reveal slender cylindrical glass tubes. What was once contained now unfolds, encouraging a fresh understanding of use and form. In every piece, she balances craft with curiosity, showing how small acts of play can transform the familiar into something altogether new.
Ceramic art often begs the question, is it functional or sculptural? The pieces I made for this exhibit attempt to push the boundaries of how we use ceramic objects by altering and combining more familiar forms, sometimes giving options in how the pieces may interact with one another. I envision these pieces becoming a foundation for whimsical centerpieces laden with botanical elements. — Dominique Mediak-Pirigyi
Together in TwoFold, Achatz and Mediak-Pirigyi celebrate the power of process and repetition, showing how works can converse with each other, evolve through experimentation, surprise, and challenge perceptions and expectations.
For inquiries, contact alexandria.ciel@huntartgallery.com.